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The UC CEISMIC Programme

The UC CEISMIC programme is based on principles of openness and collaboration, to ensure maximum utility to researchers, the public and future generations.

When we first decided to build an archive of earthquake-related
digital content we knew we wanted to store images, stories, and
media, and we wanted to avoid the fragmentation that often results
when a variety of organizations build repositories that can't share
with each other. A bright spark came up with the CEISMIC acronym
(Canterbury Earthquake Images, Stories and Media Integrated
Collection) and interest snow-balled. We don't spell out the
complete acronym now - it taxes our typing fingers too much - but
we still call ourselves the UC CEISMIC programme.

Our programme is led by the new Digital
Humanities team in the University of Canterbury College of
Arts. Digital Humanities is a new discipline that augments our 2000
year old tradition with modern technologies: we pride ourselves on
being open, collaborative, practical and receptive to 'real world'
ideas. We engage in a broad range of activities, ranging from text
encoding, digital archiving, GIS mapping, data visualization and
'big data' analysis to blogging, tweeting and online publishing.
The UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive is our modest
attempt to contribute to the rebuild. We're optimistic about
Canterbury and would like our work to benefit the community.

The UC Digital Humanities team enjoys the support of a broad
Consortium, including the National Library, the Ministry for
Culture and Heritage, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority,
Christchurch City Libraries, Te Papa, NZ On Screen, the Canterbury
Museum, the Ngai Tahu Research Centre and The Film Archive. These
organizations are working with the University of Canterbury to
build a federated archive that will throw a net over all of our
individual archives, and allow people to search across all of our
earthquake-related content. We're leveraging New Zealand's existing
assets wherever we can, and using open source technologies to
ensure our project is both technically and financially smart.

Our supporters help us with content and in some cases financial
assistance. We're proud to be associated with our founding sponsors
the Sysdoc Group and The Press and welcome enquiries from other
companies that would like to join us.

If you have any questions about the UC CEISMIC archive, or the
Digital Humanities, please contact us.